Seventy-seven Congressional members led by Democratic Representative Alcee Hastings of Florida sent a letter to President Barack Obama Monday urging him to take immediate action to stop the investigations of “don’t ask, don’t tell” violations. The letter does not call for an executive order halting discharges but rather a change in how the policy is implemented within the Department of Defense.

“It is a presidential moratorium, it is a significant presidential action, but it’s not an executive order,” said Christopher Neff, political director at the Palm Center, a research institute at University of California, Santa Barbara. “They basically want the military to disregard anyone who ‘tells’ [of someone’s sexuality] as long as there isn’t a [Uniform Code of Military Justice] violation or something criminal.”

In the piece, Ana Marie frames the issue of the military’s “Don’t ask/Don’t tell” (DADT) policy as both a civil rights issue, and a much more immediate national security issue. For good measure, she posits that repealing DADT is just good politics:

But one of the key components of recent Democratic victories has been candidates’ refusal to cede military issues to the traditionally hawkish GOP. Repealing DADT should be a part of reclaiming national security as a bipartisan issue. Honestly, would there be a more “efficient use of gays in the Army” than having them hunt down Islamic extremists, arguably the only group more uncomfortable with the idea of homosexuality than social conservatives?

That’s probably my favorite passage in the piece, though I encourage reading the whole thing.

At today’s White House Press Briefing, Robert Gibbs was asked, again, about “Don’t ask/Don’t tell” at the top of the briefing, and again said that the President was “working with the Joint Chiefs, the Pentagon and others (previously, he’s said “congress”) to bring about a change in that policy.”

I will get into this a little more deeply later, but suffice it to say I am deeply disappointed in how the DADT is going.

The measure currently in Congress is, likely, a year or more from a vote in the House, let alone passage. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, meanwhile, also appears to be in no big hurry.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but let’s see how this policy looks when actionable intelligence goes untranslated because Daniel Choi isn’t there to do it.// //